I've always hated the term 'flipped' or 'flip-flopping' when changing an opinion. If the gentleman or lady in question has educated themselves and realigned their beliefs, then they have changed their opinion.

Flip-flopping sounds like the opinion will be changed depending on the audience (i.e. unreliable).

There is a value put toward being correct from the get-go in America that should be done away with. If you are at some point in your life convinced that your previously held beliefs were wrong and should change your point of view--it's perceived as a weakness which to me is a very strange thing.

Culturally there is this childish notion that there are bad guys and good guys and that once you become a bad guy you are forever stained as such. I mean look at how we treat drug offenders, or run our prisons. It isn't about rehabilitation or trying to understand why they broke the law in the first place. It's all about "you did bad and now you will face the consequences we say you should".

Yet we are always surprised when someone we trust breaks the law or does something bad. Why should we be surprised? Clearly there was nothing stopping them from doing what they did, or else they wouldn't have been able to do so. We have this naive notion of safety and that people are generally good and you have to be broken somehow to be able to harm anyone. The reality of the situation though, is that anyone at anytime can do something bad and cause harm to others. No amount or quality of law will ever change that. The best we can do is try to manage the problem as best we can. That means coaching people to be more thoughtful and understanding what caused them to make the choices they did. Writing a rule book and threatening everyone with dire consequences if they dare violate those rules has not and will never work like we want it to.

You are stating that our version of corrective justice has no deterrence and that there's nothing stopping us from commiting crimes. But that is where you are wrong, without jail, our society would become savage and an anarchy. Coaching people after they commit a crime won't prevent it from happening in the first place. It doesn't work perfectly, far from it, but you find a better way of dettering crimes.

As for the reason for crimes, anyone with a brain can determine why somebody commited a crime. Most of the time it comes down to economic hardships where breaking the law is outweighed by the benefits of the crime.

As for the reason for crimes, anyone with a brain can determine why somebody commited a crime. Most of the time it comes down to economic hardships where breaking the law is outweighed by the benefits of the crime.

For theft sure, but that isn't all crime. What is the economic benefit from raping or murdering? I suppose there are scenarios where this does happen but people are way more complicated than pure greed driven entities that are just balancing risk versus gain.

You are stating that our version of corrective justice has no deterrence and that there's nothing stopping us from commiting crimes. But that is where you are wrong, without jail, our society would become savage and an anarchy. Coaching people after they commit a crime won't prevent it from happening in the first place. It doesn't work perfectly, far from it, but you find a better way of dettering crimes.

Then why such the huge discrepancy between countries? Is Switzerland and Denmark really such a lawless wasteland where justice is dispensed from duels at high noon? They have less than a 10th as many people incarceration, by proportion. I mean how in the hell do you explain that? Are the Danes and Swiss some sort of altruistic superpeople who don't commit crimes, ever? Hell, even England which our laws are based from is proportionally has a 5th of what people we have incarcerated and the former penal colony of Australia is even less than that. Given the fact we are the same species I think the far more likely driver is the differences in the legal and judicial systems between the two.

The existence of jails or doing time clearly does not stop people breaking the law nor does the threat of jail time. Had these been the case we wouldn't see such a ridiculously sad and disproportionate number of people incarcerated.

That said, I have offered my solution which is demonstrably better than our current solution, as per the statistics I offered.

Agree: I think people should rarely believe what they think. They should test the limits of their ideas and be prepared to change. If this post was a bumper sticker it would be "don't believe what you think"

He didn't flip or flop. He was always a supporter of global warming, few years back he came out and said its not "likely" its man made, and this was done to create fake opposition.

Just like the left-right paradigm, all fake, at the top levels its the same policy and has been the same policy for over 50 years.

Just like the fake Obama opposition to NDAA with the indefinite detention part in it, he said he was against it and that he will veto it, this was done to remove opposition and then we learned he actually demanded the provision be put it and then signed it into law at New Year's eve so that no one would notice.

This is how these people operate, they create fake opposition, different rhetoric, but same beliefs and policies and when the time is right, they uncloak and push for the one agenda that they have.

But lets say for the sake of argument that global warming is real and man made. Paying carbon taxes won't fix the problem, paying Al-Gore money to buy carbon credits at his private carbon trading center in Chicago won't fix the problem, all of their solutions are not designed to fix the problem.

But just think for a moment. He says that even 200 years ago the temperature was about 0.3 degrees Celsius higher, over 250 a full 1.5 degree Celsius higher, but how was man involved?

250 years ago everyone rode horses and used candles(no electricity), even when electricity started to be discovered very little industries were coal based, especially in the world. The most advancement was in the USA, but we are talking minuscule coal burning, its release would have been like your normal forest fires that happen every year.

So you would literally need to put aside 150 years, possibly even 200 years as the carbon released in the atmosphere would have been minuscule, no larger than how much large forest fires release.

So there is no way man could have significantly influenced the atmosphere all the way up to the 70's.

I mean I don't know how informed you are from history, but most of Europe was on horses and candles and gold standard and manual flour creation, etc... it was completely undeveloped. Same with Asia, South America, not to mention Africa. With WW1 and then WW2, the only countries developed to a certain degree couple of years before and after WW2 were the USA, Australia, Canada, Japan(to a degree), Britain, Spain, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, South Africa and Germany(to a degree).

That was it. The only real development has been the past 50-60 years where most of the world has been industrialized and that would mean significant release of carbon into the atmosphere, but that would mean that this study theory of 250 years of global warming due to carbon dioxide is wrong and can't be true.

We also have evidence that the warming has actually stopped for over 12 years now and we have the sun not only shifting its magnetic field, but in the process of getting 4 magnetic fields, I'd think the sun would be the main culprit for the slight 0.6-0.8 degree Celsius rise over the past 100+ years.

250 years ago everyone rode horses and used candles(no electricity), even when electricity started to be discovered very little industries were coal based, especially in the world. The most advancement was in the USA, but we are talking minuscule coal burning

The beginnings of trends are small. If the beginning of the industrial revolution was 'like the forest fires that happen every year,' then one must consider the effect of doubling forest fires. But the industrial revolution began, and spread, and spread, and spread. By the 1750s complete factories were in operation. Largely water-powered, they required conventional coal power for hot operations such as metallurgy and chemical production. In Britain, mind you - not in the US.

From those beginnings, industrialized population probably doubled twice by 1900, and has been increasing vastly since then. By your own admission, Britain in 1901 now accounts for eight times the yearly global forest fire effect, without accounting for any change in output per person. Which was rising - see costs of living and changes in employment. Many fewer in the fields, many more in those factories. And after 1900, we kept growing. How many industrialized humans were there in 1910? 1950? 2000? And how many 'global forest fire equivalents' must that be, at minimum?

We also have evidence that the warming has actually stopped for over 12 years now and we have the sun not only shifting its magnetic field, but in the process of getting 4 magnetic fields, I'd think the sun would be the main culprit for the slight 0.6-0.8 degree Celsius rise over the past 100+ years.

I find it interesting that increases in temperature aren't due to global warming, they're due to 'natural cycles.' But during a cooling cycle, if the temperature didn't drop, what must be happening to the background temperature? Finally, what process in the sun would increase its output so much?

I find it interesting that increases in temperature aren't due to global warming, they're due to 'natural cycles.' But during a cooling cycle, if the temperature didn't drop, what must be happening to the background temperature? Finally, what process in the sun would increase its output so much?

Interesting and true. In fact in 100 years we are about to experience a mini ice age that will start to develop and will last for at least 1000 years, so I think we need to release a lot more carbon dioxide if it was warming the atmosphere, but thing is not only is it not, its actually probably cooling the atmosphere and saving us from what would have naturally been a 2.5 degree Celsius rise in the temperatures just like in the middle ages if it wasn't for carbon dioxide.

[Carbon dioxide is] actually probably cooling the atmosphere and saving us from what would have naturally been a 2.5 degree Celsius rise in the temperatures just like in the middle ages if it wasn't for carbon dioxide.

What points to increased levels of carbon dioxide cooling the Earth? The closes match to your theory is that (as predicted in the 80s,) more greenhouse gases cool off the upper atmosphere (Much like putting on a coat makes the surface of your clothing cooler). But we do not live in the upper atmosphere, nor is the upper atmosphere very much of it by mass or effect. Explain, please?

It could have been published 30 years ago but the most basic requirement for publication is that the work is 'new'.

This guy strikes me as a ridiculous self important yahoo. There are thousands of climate researchers and thousands of papers on climate change and this guy wants to come in and pretend verifying the most obvious trend is important to anyone other than himself.

All his five papers have been submitted for publication in AGU Journal of Geophysical Research and JGR Atmospheres. Papers are probably in process of peer review. Eventually JGR might or might not publish them. No word on wheter they have been accepted yet. See: http://berkeleyearth.org/results-summary/

Most high-impact journals have a policy to publish mainly new and groundbreaking results - which these are not. They might be new to the physicist in question, and good for him he's now up to date with where the scientific community was in the 80s.

I always find it amusing seeing people I've worked with make Reddit news.

Also, while I can't speak to where the project headed, I can tell you from analysing an earlier version of the Berkeley Earth code/data (our group was called into "beta test", though all our recommendations eventually went completely ignored and was a huge waste of 8 months) that they were in way over their heads, and I'm skeptic on the validity of their results because of that.

It was little over a year ago now (and I was concurrently working on my thesis at the time, so I can't give a play-by-play of events), but Muller and Rhode were experts in their fields, which didn't include climatology nor data analysis. Now, we weren't climatologists either, but my research partner was an expert in data analysis (he works with LIGO), and was not very encouraged by them. I'm not sure how much I'm technically allowed to say, but fuck it.

One of their stated goals was openness and transparency, specifically that anyone could use their tools and reanalyze the data. However, they used almost exclusively Matlab for analysis, and the data retrieval (which downloaded from various public and nonpublic sources) was, when we got it, not intended to be open source, so you couldn't just get the raw data yourself (this was due to contractual obligations as many sources do not give away data for free).

Matlab, as you may know, is decidedly not-free (in fact very expensive for an individual), and their code was rather obfuscated, with meaningless symbols, ambiguous cross-references, ignorance of namespaces, and lack of organization (source files were organized into folders, but on execute it just loaded everything into the single namespace so finding where, say, a function was defined was a comparatively daunting task).

The data was rather haphazardly organized. I kid you not, we developed a much faster, intuitive, and space-efficient schema for temperature data in part of an afternoon over coffee. It's not a hard task, and yet they sucked balls at it.

One of their big goals was to use "100%" of the data, but the combination of our own analysis and discussions we had with actual climatologists, there's a reason other analyses don't use it all. 80% of the data is junk, either doesn't make sense, error was too large, or is redundant.

Again on the data, they represented everything in Celsius (which was good), much of it converted from the original Fahrenheit (the data spanned a large time, and the US was over-represented, so only recent non-US data would originally be in Celsius). However, in their conversion they heeded no attention to significant figures. That would be a rookie mistake for an undergrad in a lab, but if you want to be taken seriously in the profession of data analysis, it's made for a lot of facepalms.

As said, they contacted another group (who hired me on as a research assistant), though for privacy I won't say who/where, who was tasked with "beta testing" their data and software. We put many hours into reading/running code, prepping reports, being political about where they screwed up. They consistently failed to return calls and emails, when we did speak nearly every question was sidestepped, or said they'd fix it later, every suggestion fell on deaf ears. Then in (I believe) June, Muller spoke to Congress about preliminary results. We didn't even know of the existence of that paper, let alone get a chance to review it like they wanted us to. Sufficed to say our group leader was quite ticked about it, and we split paths shortly afterward to do our own climate analysis (which itself fizzled due to more important commitments from the team).

I think this is the truth. There are some quotes from a few years back where Muller basically says outright that he isn't a sceptic.

Edit (here are some):

"If Al Gore reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion - which he does, but he’s very effective at it - then let him fly any plane he wants."
- Richard Muller, 2008

"There is a consensus that global warming is real...it’s going to get much, much worse." - Richard Muller, 2008

"Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate." - Richard Muller, 2003

I cannot see how a thinking person can honestly believe Muller has done a 180 on this issue. I mean, sure, he openly criticized Mann and his chums (the infamous 'Hockey Stick'), but to claim he was once a sceptic is a decieving, calculated, and political maneuver.

Yes, I have a copy of his book, Physics for Future Presidents, which I highly recommend. He is using the word "doubt" here more in the scientific sense of doubting something until the evidence is overwhelming. It was reading Muller's book two years ago that convinced me that global warming was real. He also wrote a novel in which he portrays Jesus as a conjurer.

A physicist doubts scientists in other disciplines are counting and applying statistics properly. Only a physicist can do that properly! He will go and re-do all their efforts and show what someone who can really count and apply statistics can do. Then, after all that, well, maybe they were counting properly after all.

You are absolutely correct about individual publications. Your argument, however, gets quite weak when applied to publications in the higher tier journals, and becomes non-existent when applied to consensus across multiple scientific groups.

You go ahead and remove the ethical restrictions and I'll get you some amazing statistics. ;) (Note: I don't work directly in the medical field, but ethical issues really do [rightly!] restrict the kinds of answers that they can accurately get.)

Then, after all that, well, maybe they were counting properly after all.

Not really:

"I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed."

No, it is not. Science had already replicated the findings, multiple times over, by multiple different scientific groups, using multiple different data sets as raw data.

But the PHYSICIST comes in, and declares that it is not over until HE says it is over. That is something unique to physicists, and it is seen broadly in other scientific fields - that physicists will come in, think that they are going to reinvent the wheel, only to engage in continuous pointless mental masturbation.

Do you want science to be rigorous or to be dogmatic? In the case of the later then what you have is little better than a religion. That said as long as we are a collection of individual consciousnesses we are going to have this battle of egos. That said the important thing isn't who gets to prove what but rather that what is proved is as certain as we can make it.

It is the "I am a physicist so I am of course smarter than you and I am going to start with your starting data and succeed where you failed."

I am a scientist. I overwhelmingly find that if I perform the same experiment as someone else, I generally get the same outcomes and close to the same interpretations. It is played out many many times, as it is common in science to check on the work of others.

Only a physicist would think an entire field is so stupid that it requires a physicist to come in and straighten them out.

I agree with you it is a audacious thing to do such a thing. However I am hesitant to believe ALL physicists would behave the same way as that seems an awful lot like a stereotype, which is ironically the same type of charge you claim they use at you.

In any case, I still believe the science is far more important that whatever the egos are. Independent confirmation of a phenomenon despite whatever faulty premise drove that confirmation is as important, informationally, as the original work.

You're conflating my opinions with those of others...I never said anything about "ALL physicists". I do think Muller's attitude is wrong though, it seems to me that he cares more about making noise than anything else.

And while you're right that independent confirmation is valuable, if it comes from someone who rejects other evidence for bad reasons, I have to question whether their own work holds up to scrutiny (see another comment)

Except that if you read his NY Times editorial, in the same breath that he said "I believe in global warming" he also proclaimed that he saw no deliterious effects, wouldn't attribute it to any adverse weather events, and mulled that it might actually be offset by cooling elsewhere in the planet.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the opinion we should be celebrating is "global warming is real, people caused it, and that's just nifty -- stay the course!"

Would that we all could get the millions in funding needed to personally satisfy our curiosity.

In a world of limited resource an individual trading on his reputation to publish "Yep the various other independent groups actually do know how to produce a temperature record" is taking money which could be used for things that are genuinely unknown or scientifically controversial.

Before you congratulate Muller on his fidelity to good science, consider the hypothesis that he's spearheading a PR shift on behalf of Koch et al. "Warming exists and has the potential to benefit everyday Americans. Exxon Mobil is your trusted friend and leader in the global effort to adapt!"

All of the reasonably educated deniers have retreated from denying the fact of climate change to denying its anthropogenicity. They've had their "micro-evolution" moment. Plenty of more casual deniers aren't on the same page yet.

Edit two; I'm getting the impression people think my comment refers to the OP regarding global warming but I'm responding to Syric asking if people flip flop in general a la the scientific method, to which I say "yes", not global warming specifically. I'll show myself out.

This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding of ice age cycles.

I'm just the messenger of context, not the decider of scientific discourse. Based on the timing of your post and the downvote, I'll assume that was you.

edit: Are the downvotes because of the fact that I was between 1 second refreshes as any good redditor does that the downvote came and then another few moments when the comment came, thus providing me with adequate /r/science evidence as to whom originated the downvote and my valuable votes were lost. Damnit, these downvotes are really getting to me.

Pro redditor tip: when you find a comment you want to both downvote and reply to, post your reply, then set a javascript timer on the page to downvote the comment at some randomized time between 30 to 60 minutes later!

noonewilleverknow...

edit: the downvotes are probably because you started complaining about downvotes in /r/science.

The weird thing is that ice-ages don't come about because winters are colder; they come about when the summers are cooler (and the winter will be milder). When the glaciers can not fully melt during the summer the extra reflectivity causes a positive feedback loop.

People have a very poor perception of time on a scale of longer than a human lifespan.

Climate change works on a very long time scale, and relatively speaking, humans have had a very minuscule amount of time to affect it.

Inductive reasoning is difficult to prove when you only have one earth to experiment upon.

There are also several levels of belief, it is not black and white:

Climate change is fake, invented by environmental scientists so that they can get grants.

Climate change is real, but it is a natural, and humans haven't been around long enough.

Climate change is real, humans are the cause, and we need to change.

Whenever I encounter someone from the 3rd category, I remind them that the best thing anyone can do to reduce their carbon footprint is to not have children. Nobody's carbon footprint is less than zero.

serious question. In a previous TIL post, we learned that it took fungi 50 million years to evolve a way to decompose wood. Until then, wood piled up on the ground and the oxygen in the atmosphere spiked, and I can only assume CO2 reached record low levels. This higher oxygen content allowed for dinosaurs to evolve since their large size likely can't survive in current O2 levels.

Given that the early Carboniferious period was warm doesn't this disprove the temperature/CO2 correlation on a geologic time scale?

You've linked to the Cambrian, not Carboniferous climate page on wikipedia. The TIL said that wood arose 400m years ago, and lignin eating fungi 350m years ago. This would seem to match very well with a trough in the geological temperature record, especially if you take into account a lag for wood/wood eating fungi to get established, and reverse existing trends*:

So aside from our carbon emission issues and out of control consumption, the sun has been incredibly active and other planets in the solar system are also heating up, could this not ALSO be a result of higher solar activity?

The problem with models is that the math behind the models contain many variables that aren't fully understood. Who gets to decide how much of an effect the "el nino" slider has versus the anthro slider?

No one "gets to decide". Models are built from the observed correlation between one element and another. If every el nino cycle averages .9 - 1.1 degrees warmer, then that determines the value assigned to el nino. I would like to know what type of model that is, however. I doubt it's straight year-based correlation.

Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.

EDIT: It's really not unreasonable to ask the question, but please, people. Read the link. Read it. Read the whole thing. And then post.

We aren't immune nor has anyone implied that we are. We just know enough about the Sun and have a strong enough historical record to indicate that contemporary climate change is not driven by a deviation in solar activity.

What increased temperatures before the popularity of fossil fuels? It seems that climate change is quite natural and there is little we can do about it. Almost as if we wish it was our fault so we could come up with a solution.

There is a cycle for both solar activity and planet-wide climate shifts, and we have very solid physical evidence to track them with remarkable accuracy. So accurately in fact that scientists can confidently claim what we are seeing is not an expression of the natural cycle and cannot be accounted for without including human activity.

What increased temperatures before the popularity of fossil fuels?

A myriad of factors. If you're actually interested then dive in to the literature because this has been covered many, many times over.

It seems that climate change is quite natural and there is little we can do about it.

Global climate change has been occurring since the planet was formed, that doesn't mean all climate change is good. The whole point of the debate is that humans have affected enough change that we've side-tracked the natural cycle and we're going to reap the consequences that we can barely predict much less mitigate.

Almost as if we wish it was our fault so we could come up with a solution.

This isn't even up for debate, the evidence is in and it's conclusive; now people are only debating exactly how bad the effects are going to be.

Ok, how much pollution does the average volcano release during an eruption? Shall we install "scrubbers" on them like we do smoke stacks? Point is like it or not humans are natural as well. It isn't pollution that is the problem.

While sulfur dioxide released in contemporary volcanic eruptions has occasionally caused detectable global cooling of the lower atmosphere, the carbon dioxide released in contemporary volcanic eruptions has never caused detectable global warming of the atmosphere. This is probably because the amounts of carbon dioxide released in contemporary volcanism have not been of sufficient magnitude to produce detectable global warming. For example, all studies to date of global volcanic carbon dioxide emissions indicate that present-day subaerial and submarine volcanoes release less than a percent of the carbon dioxide released currently by human activities.

and

Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, “No.” Human activities, responsible for a projected 35 billion metric tons (gigatons) of CO2 emissions in 2010 (Friedlingstein et al., 2010), release an amount of CO2 that dwarfs the annual CO2 emissions of all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2011).

tl;dr: No, it wouldn't help significantly. Human activity dominates volcanic emissions. Factor in the material cost of manufacturing and maintaining any such scrubber system and you may not even come out ahead.

Point is like it or not humans are natural as well.

And? Being products of our environment won't stop us from causing irreparable harm in the form of changing climates.
Don't try to frame this as a "Well humans are technically extensions of natural, therefor this can't possibly go wrong!" view because that completely misses the point.

It isn't pollution that is the problem.

Pollution itself? Probably not, not all known pollutants contribute to the changes we see. Adding huge amounts of known greenhouse gases to the atmosphere much faster than the natural feedback mechanisms can sequester and otherwise remove it? Yeah, that's a problem.

Wow. 2012 AD and we're still debating this. Typical American attitude I guess though I shouldn't be surprised living here. Your ignorance of science is not enough to refute the overwhelming consensus on mad-made climate change as researched over decades by PhD holding scientists. The facts do NOT fit your narrative. Go take basic level courses on chemistry and some physics; educate yourself on the basic principals of thermodynamics and chemical interaction before you start talking about something you have no idea about. Jesus, I hope the educated outnumber the ignorant in the future because right now with that attitude history will shame you, and your children will hate you.

the sun has been incredibly active and other planets in the solar system are also heating up, could this not ALSO be a result of higher solar activity?

You seem to have two misunderstandings in your question.

Firstly the other planets are not heating up. That would require observed temperature rises on all the other planets and moons. Not seen. And it would require huge changes in solar output. Not observed either.

Temperature variations have been observed on some other planets (e.g. Mars, Pluto) but these changes cannot be attributed to solar variation. They are seasonal variations caused by planet's rotational tilt angle and orbital eccentricity.

Secondly Sun has not been "incredibly active". In fact solar activity has been on a downward trend since 60's, yet Earth has been warming. We have just passed solar cycle's minimum which was 2008-9 and was exceptionally low and long. Right now we are heading towards solar maximum which is expected in 2013. It will be lower than average maximum.

Solar output (TSI) varies a little during a solar cycle. But this variation is very small (some thousand's) and does not explain modern warming.

When I replied there were no replies and he was at -2. Either way, I don't think I should be held responsible for whether or not he replies. Mine was more of a general point that in r/science we shouldn't be downvoting questions.

the former end game was cap and trade. Now that C&T has been exposed as a huge wealth building engine for gore and the like, the next end game is some other bullshit that will emerge as a tool for others to build wealth.

Not sure that I completely agree with his saying "humans are almost entirely the cause" of global warming, which is really called global climate change. As a student of geology, I have learned that the planet goes through obvious and cyclical phases of hothouse and ice age, going back millions of years. The planet is simply in the transition between the two right now, we've been in an unusually long era of warm temperatures, which over the next thousand years or whatever will escalate until the chain reaction of events plunges the earth into an ice age for a couple thousand years, which will then eventually subside and we'll have warm temps again for a while, ad nauseum. These events are certainly being sped up by human civilization and our greenhouse gas emissions and such, but even if there were no humans on the planet, earth would still go through cycles of ice ages and interglacial periods. Check out Milankovitch cycles, also oxygen isotope ratio in ice cores. That being said, the recent (past 250yrs or so) rises in temperature are most likely a result of an increase of CO2 emission due to increased industrialization across the globe; the CO2, global temperature, and global population increase curves are all pretty similar. So humans have done in ~250 years what it would have taken mother earth like 2000 years to achieve, but either way it still would have happened. And that's my opinion on the matter.

So humans have done in ~250 years what it would have taken mother earth like 2000 years to achieve, but either way it still would have happened

You haven't looked at the data. We have actually reversed the long term trend with our CO2 emissions.

The earth had been in a long term cooling trend since the post-ice age temperature peak (the Holocene Climatic Optimum) about 6 thousand years ago. We expect that (without AGW) the Milankovitch cycle would have resulted in a long term cooling trend for the next 20 thousand years or so.

So, we were slowly cooling into the next ice age, but now we're warming up until the proper reactions occur to send us into the next ice age? Which means that instead of 20000 years of gradual cooling, we'll get a couple (hundreds?) of years of warming and then quickly dip into a cooling trend, correct?

More like a several hundred of years of fast warming as the climate reaches energy balance with the excess CO2 and then a very slow move into a quite gradual decline as CO2 is gradually weathered out of the atmosphere.

Well CO2 isn't the only thing affecting climate change though. As in, the CO2 level may gradually decline after reaching its peak in several hundred years, but by then it (and it's associated temperature increase) will have set into motion things such as mass ice melt and drastic sea level rise which will usher in a global cooling event because of issues such as increased thermal reflection from the larger sea surfaces and colder oceans because of the influx of meltwater (not to mention salinity issues probably). Ocean currents would be changed, resulting in who knows what climatically. Unless I'm missing something (which I may very well be) that will help even out these kinds of changes.

mass ice melt and drastic sea level rise which will usher in a global cooling event because of issues such as increased thermal reflection from the larger sea surfaces and colder oceans because of the influx of meltwater

1) It takes MUCH more energy to melt ice than to warm water. The energy going right now towards melting ice isn't going to warming the oceans. So as long as the ice caps are melting they act to cool the rest of the planet. This slows down warming. After they are melted, the planet warms even more because they aren't using that energy to melt ice anymore.

2) Why do you think that larger sea surfaces will result in 'increased thermal reflection'? Except when the sun is at low angles with the horizon, most light shining on the oceans is adsorbed by the water. Making the oceans deeper just makes it easier to adsorb light. More water won't 'increase thermal reflection'.

3) If you replace the ice caps (which reflect nearly all the light shining on them back to space) with land and open ocean, they adsorb much more energy than the ice caps did. This amplifies warming by quite a bit.

2) Sea surface is different from sea depth...the increased surface area of the oceans as they rise (thus covering more of the land mass, which absorbs heat from the sun) will reflect more sunlight than land does.

3) So then that's what I meant when I said "unless I'm missing something that will help even out these kinds of changes." I was under the impression that water had a higher albedo than it does (at least at certain times of the day...). This increase in heat absorption as ice is changed to water will help counteract the cooling effect of lots of meltwater, somewhat stabilizing the system.
So what would you say would happen next, after more of the earth is covered in somewhat colder ocean water? Still a warming trend, due to loss of reflective ice caps? I mean, there are obviously a ton of variables to consider once all this starts happening.

No need for insults, if you don't agree with what I said then a simple rebuttal is all that's required. And no, I'm no physicist or statistician or anything, just a simple geology student. The only point I was trying to make is that earth does what it does, regardless of what species are living on the surface of the crust, or what said species are doing. No, humans aren't exactly helping the situation, but saying that human civilization is the main cause of global climate change is just not correct, the global climate was going through these changes long before humankind was around. Yes, in the past ~250 years, the human impact has been the strongest impetus for the warming trend across the globe, and perhaps that's the only part of "global warming" that the author is talking about.

Flip-flopping makes you a bad presidential candidate, lousy friend and scary driver. But changing your mind when the evidence crushes your current theory, that makes you a scientist.

And it doesn't matter whether or not you believed him, before or now. He is almost totally irrelevant to whether or not you should accept the scientific consensus on global warming. What is interesting about the story is that he made a public reversal of his position, despite the celebrity and funding that his skepticism had brought him, because the scientific method is more convincing than the Koch brothers.

I'm confused by your position -- "flip flopping isn't good." Imagine you believe the world is flat and then do years of research to convince yourself that the world is actually round. Is it bad to switch your opinion? Or is it bad to hold on to a belief that you now know not to be true?

He hasn't flip flopped. Previously he said that the evidence presented that global warming existed and was caused by humans was not compelling. Now he says that this new evidence is compelling. I don't think he ever claimed that there was compelling evidence that global warming didn't exist.

Right, I'm pretty sure the global warming people told me I could never believe anyone but a climatologist about global warming. Thus i can not respect his findings since he is but a physicist. A shame really.

I knew global warming was real over a decade ago, so I know plenty more than this fucker who just decided to read the findings yesterday. I don't care if he works at Berkeley, you have to be a moron to not believe in global warming.